1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the field of safety management of one or more vehicles, and more particularly, to analyzing information relating to a vehicle's performance characteristics against map database attributes to assess a vehicle's tendency to operate according to a set of criteria.
2. Description of Related Art
The American trucking industry employs nearly ten million people. This includes more than 3 million truck drivers who travel over 400 billion miles per year to deliver to Americans 87% of their transported food, clothing, finished products, raw materials, and other items. Trucks are the only providers of goods to 75 percent of American communities, and for many people and businesses located in towns and cities across the United States, trucking services are the only available means to ship goods. As five percent of the United States' Gross Domestic Product is created by truck transportation, actions that affect the trucking industry's ability to move its annual 8.9 billion tons of freight have significant consequences for the ability of every American to do their job well and to enjoy a high quality of life.
With the importance of the American trucking industry in mind, it is unfortunate that workers in the American trucking industry experience the most fatalities of all occupations, accounting for twelve percent of all American worker deaths. Approximately two-thirds of fatally injured truckers are involved in highway crashes. Roughly 475,000 large trucks are involved in crashes that result in approximately 5,360 fatalities and 142,000 injuries each year. Of these fatalities, about seventy-four percent are occupants of other vehicles (usually passenger cars), three percent are pedestrians, and twenty-three percent are occupants of large trucks. As there was a twenty-nine percent increase between the years of 1990 and 2000 in the number of registered large trucks and a forty-one percent increase in miles traveled by large trucks, it is evident that the risks involved in the trucking industry are not simply going to go away. If anything, this increase in trucks on the road and miles traveled evidences that the $3 billion in lost productivity to the economy and hundreds of millions of dollars in insurance premiums caused by truck crashes may get even worse.
Studies and data indicate that driver errors and unacceptable driver behaviors are the primary causes of, or primary contributing factors to, truck-involved crashes. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration reports that speeding (i.e., exceeding the speed limit or driving too fast for conditions) is a contributing factor in twenty-two percent of fatal crashes involving a truck in 2000. Additionally, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reports that speeding is a contributing factor in twenty-nine percent of all fatal crashes in 2000. More than 12,000 people lost their lives in 2000 in part due to speed-related crashes.
With the pressure of making on-time deliveries, many drivers are willing to accept the risks of unsafe driving in order to achieve timely arrivals. Unfortunately, the primary tool for preventing unsafe driving—law enforcement—can only be present in so many places at so many times. Even when law enforcement is present, drivers can communicate with one another to inform them of ‘speed traps’ or other locales where law enforcement presence is high. While drivers may engage in ultra-safe driving in these areas, it does not change the fact that a vast majority of the time these drivers are on the road, they are not subject to any type of third-party supervision or accountability with regard to their driving habits. Thus, additional oversight of driver behavior is required.
Although causes of crashes are largely human, important solutions may be found in technology to facilitate and augment driver performance. For example, to minimize these costs, conventional telemetric safety solutions are used to observe and measure vehicle tendencies and patterns for improving safety. Generally, these solutions are binary in nature in that they are limited to generating simple triggering alarms, such as whether a particular characteristic is within an acceptable tolerance (e.g., whether a vehicle's speed is in compliance with a pre-set maximum authorized speed).
Such binary solutions offer only temporary notice (e.g., an audible alarm) to the driver that they are engaged in unsafe driving behavior and when that behavior abates (e.g., the cessation of the alarm). These solutions do not provide an indication of long-term or habitual unsafe driving behavior and can easily be ‘muted’ or otherwise disabled by the driver whereby any value offered by such an alarm solution is eliminated. These binary solutions, too, often do not inform another party, such as a fleet manager, of such unsafe driving behavior as the driver alone hears the alarm and is made aware of the unsafe behavior.
High-grade digital mapping systems offering detailed, digital models of the American highway, road, and street networks and developed for the consumer in-vehicle navigation market have provided an opportunity to combine map data with vehicle operation and location data to offer innovative software based services and solutions. Presently available digital map databases, such as those provided by NAVTEQ, can include up to 150 individual road attributes as well as individual points of interest, localities, and addresses. Continuing developments in map database technology allow for allocation of even more attributes to segments of road data including speed limit, school and construction zone information, car pool lane limitations including persons, and hours of operation, prohibitions on turns (e.g., no right turn on red between 6-9 AM), and so forth.
In the transportation industry, managers of trucking fleets worry about their vehicles and drivers speeding on arterial and surface streets as well as in highway construction zones in addition to violating other traffic ordinances. Not only does such behavior put employees and third-parties at risk, but it is also directly proportional to the costs of insurance premiums that result in an increase in the price of transportation services that trickle-down to customers benefiting from delivery services. Being able to monitor and address unsafe driving behavior would result in a decrease of these incidents and a decrease in insurance costs.
There presently exists no user-friendly mechanism and or analytic tools for measuring a vehicle's and or a driver's performance given geographic and environmental contexts of that vehicle in determining whether that vehicle or driver is operating outside a margin of safety.